Elaine Stead is officially NOT a feminist cretin

Do not speak ill of some women, neither will they forget nor forgive, and they will have the magistracy on their side in persecuting you for it.

Australia’s absurd defamation laws have struck again, and Australian Financial Review writer Joe Aston has lost a defamation suit against some female businessman named Elaine Stead, head of venture capital company Blue Sky, because according to our hero Joe she picked some trendy but hopeless dud startups to invest in, and Joe was mean to her about it in the august pages of AFR, calling her sundry things:

• feminist cretin
• prodigious destroyer of capital
• pyromaniac (of capital)

Elaine was not having it and took him to Federal Court where in an interminably long reasoning Justice Michael Lee, who clearly loves the sound of his voice, awarded damages of $280,000 against Joe and his employer, Nine Entertainment Co. It’s far from over and will probably drag on for some time yet in appeals, cost so far $2 million in lawyerly fees.

Elaine’s counsel, Sue Chrysanthou, has previously raked in millions no doubt in many famous defamation cases. She represented the absolute dumb as a post Greens senator Sarah Hanson Young when libertarian senator David Leyonhjelm made her cry when telling her to stop “shagging” men if she hated them so much. Everybody misses Leyonhjelm in the senate.

She also defended actor Geoffrey Rush, who was accused of being sexually aggressive towards a colleague by the media, and won a record $2.9 million payout for him in Sydney last year, Sydney being “widely regarded as one of the world’s defamation capitals” (on volume of cases), a renown of which we can all be proud.

In arguing Rush’s case it is not known if Chrysanthou used this:

The Sydney Daily Telegraph targeted my client because he is a man.

But, you are very clever, and have worked out that she did use the same argument in our current matter of vital interest, the case of the woman who we wish to make crystal clear is not a feminist cretin, with one obvious small change:

Mr Aston targeted my client because she is a woman.

Exhibit A: